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Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Update - Sept 4, 2013I added more descriptions and changed NjRat / Backdoor.LV to Vidgrab - in the traffic communications are similar to NjRat/Backdoor;lv but it does not use base64 and sends initial request starting with ...3 (0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x33) followed by null bytes - it does not start with lv|I am still looking for names for a few other backdoors below, so if you recognize them, please let me know.

Recently, my custom sandbox has been trying to open some Word attachments in a browser because the filetype fingerprint service detected them as MIME HTML files. Browsers are usually the default applications for such types and they did contain the CVE-2012-0158 exploit. A quick Google lookup yielded a May 2013 report from the Chinese company Antiy "The Latest APT Attack by Exploiting CVE-2012-0158 Vulnerability", which described this new exploit vector.
Antiy noted that these MHTML files evade antivirus and indeed only half of vendors represented on Virustotal detect. However, many companies rely on their automated tools, inline and standalone sandboxes not just Antivirus to determine if the file is malicious.

I checked how these files (file without any extension) were processed by other commercial and open source mailboxes. 3 out of 5 well known commercial and open source mail scan and web sandbox vendors returned no output or informed me that that filetype was not supported. While writing this post, I noticed that Malwaretracker also mentioned the rise in this vector usage in his post on Friday, so I am sure the sandbox vendors are fixing the issue as we speak.

I checked 25 MHTML CVE-2012-0158 files and compared their targets (at least those I could obtain) and payload. The analysis showed a good variety of trojans and predominantly human rights (Tibet, Uyghur) activists. I will post a month worth of these files.

Malware samples are available for download by any responsible whitehat researcher. By downloading the samples, anyone waives all rights to claim punitive, incidental and consequential damages resulting from mishandling or self-infection.